Building Breakfast

By Anna Sykora

Across from me, the driest lady on our German tour to the Lago di Garda sits in her assigned seat, sawing her kaiser roll in two without producing crumbs. She is tiny, maybe ninety, her crooked fingers adorned with jeweled rings. I try not to stare at her emerald, and she smiles at me, the only American on this tour, over our meager banquet. I'd left my German husband at home.

She picks open the foil on her pat of butter, slices off a piece so thin it curls, and applies it to her roll's bottom half. Repeating herself, rotating the half, she creates a ring of subtle petals. The last bit she places in the middle, then smoothes the butter into a layer that shows no mark of her knife. Next, from our chipped platter she selects three pieces of cheese, without any holes, and places them on her buttered half roll, overlapping but parallel. Using her knife to saw off strips, precisely parallel to the cheese, she eats these with her fork, silently masticating and swallowing. She observes our tidy plastic flowers through heavy-lidded eyes. By now our table is littered again with my American crumbs...

She dabs at her thin-lipped mouth with her napkin, and consults her watch, which is gold. Our bus will leave in half an hour, at 7:45, but we will be crowding around it by 7:40, for "the punctuality of soldiers is five minutes before the time."

Yesterday, she fetched me from my room, where (having lost track of life) I was holding up the departure of our bus. She didn't scold, just asked what I was reading and smiled like a child when I showed her Ovid's Metamorphosis. "I prefer Rilke," she told me.

Now she picks up the top of her roll, inspects it, reaches for a second pat of butter: "You eat another roll, too."